Chapter Fourteen

Devastation

“Something’s wrong,” said Lisa.

The boy held her hand as they walked, staring up at the blank grey sky. All around them, beyond the cliff-edge on their left, was the awesome drop into the void and the surreal stone peaks and crags that had once been Edmonville.

“You don’t say,” said Annie with a sour expression. “The world’s fallen apart, we’re stranded and it looks like everyone’s dead or gone. That’s wrong, all right.”

“No, I mean with her. That woman, Candy.”

Alex and Candy were up ahead, leading the way, and out of earshot.

“You mean apart from the fact that she hates her husband’s guts?”

“She knows something…they both know something. Maybe about what’s happened, or how it’s happened. But I can tell, and it’s tearing them both apart.”

Up ahead, Alex said: “I don’t know, Candy. I just don’t know what we’re going to do.”

“There must be a way off here.” For the moment, Candy had forgotten that he wasn’t supposed to call her that. “We can’t just be…stranded…like this. It’s not…it’s just not real.”

“Someone will come. Even if we are cut off. The whole world can’t be…” The word dead caught in his throat and would not come out.

“We’ve got to tell them,” continued Candy after a while.

Alex didn’t have to ask what she was talking about. He couldn’t get rid of the images from the previous night. The man in the off-licence store, with the wooden shard in his eye. The exploding black wave that had crashed down the street after them.

“It didn’t happen,” he said. “It couldn’t have happened.”

“What the hell are you talking about? We were both there. We both saw him.”

“I’ve been thinking about it…” Alex looked quickly over his shoulder, afraid lest those behind should overhear what he was saying. “Maybe it wasn’t an earth tremor, or a ’quake, or whatever. Maybe it was something else.”

“Like what?”

“Like an air attack. A bomb, or something like that. Maybe someone somewhere pushed the button at last.”

“That might explain what’s happened, but not the man or that…that…black…” Candy couldn’t find the words to describe the black torrent that had pursued them.

“Maybe it was more than just a bomb. Maybe there was some kind of gas attack. Chemical weapons. That fog barrier, the clouds that were all around us last night. That could have been chemical, couldn’t it? I reckon that’s the answer. It didn’t kill us, but it killed all the others.”

“But Alex,” said Candy. “That man…”

“The gas! Don’t you see? Maybe it made us hallucinate. See things that weren’t there.”

“That black…black wave. Alex, that was what killed all those people back there in the community centre.”

“I don’t know about that part. About the people dying. There was…an explosion, wasn’t there? That’s what did it. A black tidal wave in the middle of the street? Think about it, Candy. How could that happen? Where did it go? It just vanished. That was because it wasn’t there. We imagined it was there. Just like the gas made us imagine the man in the store.”

“But could we both see and hear the same thing?”

“It must be that. Can’t you see? Nothing else makes sense.”

Candy began to nod her head vigorously. It was the only thing that added up. “Maybe…maybe none of this is happening.” When Alex looked across, her eyes were feverish. “Maybe it’s just the gas, the chemicals. Maybe we’ll wake up in a minute…”

Alex opened his mouth to say that she was hoping for too much. But he forced himself to be silent. Maybe if he prayed hard enough, it would all be a dream.

Twenty yards behind, Lisa said: “Look at them. They do know something.”

“All I know is that we haven’t eaten for a long time,” interrupted Annie. “And we’ve got to get something inside the boy.”

“Are you hungry?” asked Lisa, looking down at him. The boy continued looking at the sky, unhearing. He clutched Lisa’s hand as if it were a safety line.

“He needs help,” said Annie.

“I think he’s in the safest place possible at the moment. He’s keeping the pain away.”

Smoke was visible ahead, drifting up into the sky. No one believed that it could be a good sign as they skirted around the cliff-edge, heading in its direction.

It didn’t take them long to find the first dead bodies.

On the other side of what had once been a main road was a fast-food restaurant: Light ’n’ Heavy Bite. Once it had been a single-storey building, with floor-to-ceiling windows. Now it had simply ceased to exist, the entire construction flattened by the ’quake. Smoke rose from the rubble, and the remains of two cars were visible beneath concrete slabs that had spilled out on to the tarmac like a gigantic pack of cards. The driver of the first car had been squashed up against the cracked windscreen when a slab had fallen over the roof, pulverising it. Somehow the windscreen hadn’t been punched out and the driver’s face remained screwed up against the glass in a hideous, bloody scowl. The stark white flats of his hands, fingers spread, were clearly visible against the cracked glass. Lisa walked the boy away, averting his head, refusing to let him look. The others waited at the roadside, trying not to look at the dead driver, trying not to think about whether there was anyone else inside the car, as Alex went to investigate the ruin. When he returned, white-faced, he couldn’t speak.

“Anyone…?” began Annie.

Alex could only shake his head, and no more needed to be said.

At the bottom of the street, furrowed and cracked by the immense forces that had rippled underground, every single window in a used-car franchise had shattered, covering the parked cars in the forecourt in shrouds of gleaming ice. The glass had spilled out into the street like fine snow. It crackled underfoot as they carefully made their way past. Someone was lying in the office, by the side of an overturned desk. The glass sheets that lay around the figure were wet with blood. Annie called as they passed, but the person—whether male or female—was clearly dead. No one else moved inside the showroom, and it was impossible to get through the fallen avalanche of jagged glass to investigate further.

The boy began humming to himself as they passed. Lisa pulled him close as they moved.

There had been an apartment block beyond, sixteen storeys high.

It no longer existed, and had been replaced by a thirty-foot-high demolition site of twisted steel cable, sundered concrete blocks and rubble, stretching down to the cliff-edge, where the top six floors had vanished into the abyss. The smoke that they had seen earlier was coming from the other side of the mound. They clambered around it and saw what had happened.

A concrete flyover had come down on the main road. A coach and five vehicles had been passing underneath when the ’quake had severed the concrete supports beneath ground level and the entire structure had collapsed. Petrol had spilled from the ruptured tanks, ignited, and burned through the night. The remains of the coach and two of the demolished cars were still visible, blackened skeletons still smoking in the rubble.

“Shall we…?” said Annie, waving a hand hopelessly at the carnage.

“What’s the point?” said Lisa. “No one could have survived that.”

“Where is everyone?” Candy looked as if she might lose control completely. “Where are the fire brigade, the ambulances, the emergency services? Where are they, for Christ’s sake?”

No one replied, and they kept moving.

Everywhere was the same.

Buildings in ruins. Cars, coaches and lorries overturned, burned or smashed. Concrete and tarmac cracked and rippled in solid waves where the immense underground fractures had sped across Edmonville, uprooting underground water pipes, fracturing gas mains and demolishing most of the buildings. And beyond the cliff-edge the same surreal sights. The plateaus of rock, containing at what had once been ground level the few remaining jigsaw pieces of Edmonville. Beneath and around the ragged plateaus, other pinnacles of rock clustered like gigantic fractured stalagmites; reaching up from the depths of the chasm on all sides, as if striving to reach that tenuous ground level. Some spiralled upwards to sharpened points; others had flattened tops forming bridges as if trying to create some bizarre rival to Monument Valley. Had the entire city of Edmonville been dropped down on to the Grand Canyon?

Walking ahead again, Alex and Candy suddenly stopped.

Another scene of carnage? More horror?

“What is it?” asked Annie. And then Lisa gasped.

“Someone’s coming!” she exclaimed. “Look! Someone’s coming!”

Filled with joy and relief, Annie and Lisa ran with the boy to join the others, seeing the figures up ahead who’d emerged from the ruins and were even now running towards them.

“Thank God,” said Annie, and then she saw the expression on Alex and Candy’s faces. It was a look of despair.

“It’s them,” said Alex flatly. “It’s Jay and the others.”

And when Lisa and Annie looked, they saw Wayne and Damon suddenly stagger to a halt; saw their own look of joy crumple and fade as they recognised them.

“Oh, good Christ,” said Candy, her voice cracking. “We’ve been right around the edge, and there’s no way off.”

There was a long, motionless silence as they all stood looking at each other.

Then Jay began yelling something at the sky, punching at the air with his fists.

Finally, he pulled himself together, shook his head—and walked slowly towards them. Although no one spoke, they all felt the same. It was as if everything in this strangely and horribly changed world was against them. They’d sensed that they were stranded here, and now they had the proof.

“Why doesn’t someone come?” moaned Candy.

Wearily, Jay walked past Wayne and Damon, head down. When he was standing in front of the others, he looked up at them.

“I think we’re stuffed,” he said simply.

 

They heard the music before they reached Wady Street.

“It’s a radio,” said Damon. “Someone’s switched on a radio.”

But when he turned to the others, all trudging back the way that Jay’s party had come, his fragile expression of hope faded. There had been elation when they thought they’d found others who might help, but the realisation that they’d been right around this bizarre, ruined plateau and discovered no way off had crushed any remaining wishful thinking in the others. There had been too much horror, too much anguish—and the remaining optimism could not be rekindled. They had been walking in hopeless silence.

“Well, it’s something, isn’t it?” Damon went on desperately.

They kept walking slowly as the sounds of the yearning harmonica drew them on. The tune it played might be Spanish. A slow, melancholic lament. It seemed somehow to resonate in the silence. Under different circumstances, it might have sounded beautiful. But not here, on this crag in no-man’s-land.

“It’s Gordon,” said Jay at last.

When they finally turned into the ruins of Wady Street, they could see the lone figure sitting on the shattered garden wall, next to the ruins of what had once been Gordon’s home. No one spoke or called out to him as they picked their way over the rubble in his direction. And if he heard them coming, Gordon showed no sign of it. He remained hunched there, guitar slung over his shoulder, playing his lament. It was a haunting, mournful sound. He finished as they finally drew level with him, but remained looking steadfastly in the opposite direction.

“I told you,” Jay said to him. “There’s no way you could dig her out of there…”

“Did,” said Gordon. “Found.”

“You found your aunt?”

“Dead,” said Gordon.

When he turned to look at them, his face was a blank white mask from the plaster dust that had gushed around him as he’d clawed at the rubble. There were two streaks on his cheeks where he’d wiped away tears. Gordon stood, and put the harmonica back in his top pocket.

“There’s no way off,” Lisa told him. “We’re stuck up here.”

Gordon nodded. He could not react to the news. He’d tried to play the grief out, but it was still there.

“So now what?” asked Candy.

“I suppose we should eat,” said Annie. “The boy needs something. I guess we all do.”

“I’ll never keep anything down,” said Lisa. “Not after what we’ve seen.”

“Annie’s right,” said Jay. “We may not have an appetite, but we need to keep up our strength.”

“I need a drink,” said Candy. “A big drink.”

Alex looked as if he were going to say something, but Candy glared and he shut up.

“There’s a mini-mart still standing over there,” said Wayne. They followed his pointing finger, through the ruins of one of Wady Street’s houses to a back street which ran along the eastern edge of the park.

“Someone will come,” said Alex. “We just have to wait.”

No one answered as they clambered through the ruins towards the mini-mart.